How it works...

To add the list box for a company, right-click in the blank area of the sheet, and choose New Sheet Object | List Box as shown in the following screenshot:

As you can see in the drop-down menu, there are multiple types of sheet objects to choose from such as List Box, Statistics Box, Chart, Input Box, Current Selections Box, Multi Box, Table Box, Button, Text Object, Line/Arrow Object, Slider/Calendar Object, and Bookmark Object. We will only cover a few of them in the course of this article.

The Help menu and extended examples that are available on the QlikView website will allow you to explore ideas beyond the scope of this article. The Help documentation for any item can be obtained by using the Help menu present on the top menu bar.

Choose the List Box sheet object to add the company dimension to our analysis. The New List Box wizard has eight tabs: General, Expressions, Sort, Presentation, Number, Font, Layout, and Caption, as shown in the following screenshot:

Give the new List Box the title Company. The Object ID will be system generated. We choose the Company field from the fields available in the datafile that we loaded. We can check the Show Frequency box to show frequency in percent, which will only tell us how many account lines in October were loaded for each company.

In the Expressions tab, we can add formulas for analyzing the data. Here, click on Add and choose Average. Since, we only have numerical data in the Amount field, we will use the Average aggregation for the Amount field. Don't forget to click on the Paste button to move your expression into the expression checker. The expression checker will tell you if the expression format is valid or if there is a syntax problem.

If you forget to move your expression into the expression checker with the Paste button, the expression will not be saved and will not appear in your application.

The Sort tab allows you to change the Sort criteria from text to numeric or dates. We will not change the Sort criteria here.

The Presentation tab allows you to adjust things such as column or row header wrap, cell borders, and background pictures.

The Number tab allows us to override the default format to tell the sheet to format the data as money, percentage, or date for example. We will use this tab on our table box currently labeled Sum(Amount) to format the amount as money after we have finished creating our new company list box.

The Font tab lets us choose the font that we want to use, its display size, and whether to make our font bold.

The Layout tab allows us to establish and apply themes, and format the appearance of the sheet object, in this case, the list box.

The Caption tab further formats the sheet object and, in the case of the list box, allows you to choose the icons that will appear in the top menu of the list box so that we can use those icons to select and clear selections in our list box. In this example, we have selected search, select all, and clear.

We can see that the percentage contribution to the amount and the average amount is displayed in our list box. Now, we need to edit our straight table sheet object along with the amount. Right-click on the straight table sheet object and choose Properties from the pop-up menu. In the General tab, give the table a suitable name. In this case, use Sum of Accounts. Then move over to the Number tab and choose Money for the number format. Click on Apply to immediately apply the number format, and click on OK to close the wizard.

Now our straight table sheet object has easier to read dollar amounts. One of the things we notice immediately in our analysis is that we are out of balance by one dollar and fifty-nine cents, as shown in the following screenshot:

We can analyze our data just using the list boxes, by selecting a company from the Company list and seeing which account groups and which cost centers are included (white) and which are excluded (gray). Our selected Company shows highlighted in green:

By selecting Cheyenne Holding, we can see that it is indeed a holding company and has no manufacturing groups, sales accounting groups, or cost centers. Also the company is in balance. But what about a more graphic visual analysis?

To create a chart to further visualize and analyze our data, we are going to create a new sheet object. This time we are going to create a bar chart so that we can see various company contributions to administrative costs or sales by the Acct.5 field, and the account number. Just as when we created the company list box, we right-click on the sheet and choose New Sheet Object | Chart. This opens the following Chart Properties wizard for us:

We follow the steps through the chart wizard by giving the chart a name, selecting the chart type, and the dimensions we want to use. Again our expression is going to be SUM(Amount), but we will use the Label option and name it Total Amount in the Expression tab. We have selected the Company and Acct.5 dimensions in the Dimension tab, and we take the defaults for the rest of the wizard tabs.

When we close the wizard, the new bar chart appears on our sheet, and we can continue our analysis. In the following screenshot, we have chosen Cheyenne Manufacturing for our Company and all Sales/COS Trade to Mexico Branch as Account Groups. These two selection then show us in our straight table the cost centers that are associated with sales/COS trade to Mexico branch. In our bar chart, we see the individual accounts associated with sales/COS trade to Mexico branch and Cheyenne Manufacturing along with the related amounts posted for these accounts.

Summary

We created more sheet objects, started with a new list box to begin analyzing our loaded data. We alson added dimensions for analysis.

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